TO THE DEATH: After nearly 25 years, Christ Illusion shows the band sharper of tooth and more frenzied than ever.

On A&E not long ago, there was a documentary about a South Bronx biker gang called the Ching-a-Lings: Road Warriors: The Biker Brotherhood. Fat men swaggered for the camera while a grave voiceover waxed bozo-anthropological: “Joey, a long-time ‘brother,’ has been ‘doing time’ upstate . . . ” etc. At one point a “marijuana cigarette” was mentioned. Odd crew, the Ching-a-Lings — past their wolfish, chain-swinging prime, evidently, and now in a reduced and semi-domesticated condition, with jobs, daughters, bellies, and so on. “I think they are a motorcycle group,” mused their attorney. “I don’t think they’re really a gang.” But the Chings still had the barbaric sentimentality of your true hoodlum: the camera fawned in circles as they celebrated the anniversary of a truck-flattened brother by splurting beer at his photograph and flipping cocaine at it. The commercials were for Metamucil, anti-arthritis pills, and pet medication.

Given that the members of Slayer are now entering middle age — they will celebrate their 25th anniversary as a band next year — one might have expected, indeed trusted, a similar fate to embrace them. A quartet of paunchy ex-nutters, riding the brimstone fumes of a long-extinguished rep. Bygone whiffs of Nazi scandal. Harmless fist shaking into the lens. Old tunes, old glories; the way we were. But here is Christ Illusion (American), the band’s tenth studio album, proving them to be sharper of tooth and more frenzied than ever. “Religion is hate/Religion is fear/Religion is WAR/Religion is rape/Religion’s obscene/Religion’s a who-OOOOOOORE!!!” Want Slayer? Here’s your fucking Slayer. The drilling riffs; the absurd velocity; the whizzing, whinnying, viciously unmemorable solos; the flesh-wound voice; the tremendous clarity of Dave Lombardo’s cymbals; and the cover art (by Larry Carroll) that features a stump-armed Christ in a landscape of severed heads. Not a comeback, because they never went away, but a dramatic display of to-the-death tenacity.

It’s no mean thing to hold this fast to the banner of your name. Take a look at Slayer’s peers, their fellow graduates from the thrash-metal class of ’82. Metallica became one of the U2/REM behemoth acts, stamping their brand across the world, but in the process they acquired a strange and quizzical self-consciousness: they got hip or something, and now they’re lost. Who expects another good album from them? Out of ideas, Anthrax are their own tribute band, on the road forever playing note-for-note reproductions of 1987’s Among the Living. And that snarling old warhorse Dave Mustaine occasionally clip-clops stageward with Megadeth, but once you’ve heard him do “Wake Up Dead,” you’ve heard it all. Of the original four, only Slayer are still it, the thing, the business. Walk into a busy public restroom and shout their name — try it: ‘SLAY-YERRRR!’ — and I guarantee that from somewhere nearby you will get a grunt or chuckle of affirmation, if not an actual assenting howl. Even in the ladies’. Slayer have never changed, never fucked around: they went straight into the brainstem and stayed there.

The big apple With his big, bearish presence and Buddha-like air of reflective certitude, Rick Rubin has been christened savior of the music industry.

Gossip | Music For Men Working with master minimalist Rick Rubin, Gossip have lost more than the "The" from their name, as they've pared down their sound while amping up the pop and R&B-isms of their earlier work in this clear and earnest bid for the big kahuna.

Chairmen of the boards Not unlike Swedish, Tagalog, and Esperanto, music is a language, with its own conjugations and (lewdly) dangling participles.

Second chances When Rick Rubin went looking for Johnny Cash in 1993, he found a master songwriter and a living depository of American folk lore who’d been left behind by the changing tides of the industry and the times.

Having more fun By the time Car Wheels on a Gravel Road came out, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Emmylou Harris, and Tom Petty had all recorded Williams’s songs.

Solitary man? It’s easy to forget just how hard it’s been to pin down Neil Diamond over the years.

Double dosed May has been a big month for mainstream rock, with high-profile releases by Pearl Jam, Tool, and Jack White’s Raconteurs racking up blockbuster sales and claiming pop-cultural real estate reserved more often these days for Kevlar-clad rappers.

GETTING TO KNOW PHILIP LARKIN WITH A NEW EDITION OF HIS POEMS | April 26, 2012 "A smash of glass and a rumble of boots/Electric trains and a ripped-up phonebooth/Paint-spattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out, and a kick in the balls." These lines are not by Philip Larkin, of course — they're by Paul Weller.

BLACK SABBATH ARE BACK — IN PRINT AND ON FILM | November 14, 2011 The literature on Black Sabbath — already extensive — will continue to grow, as we try, try, try again to wrap our poor noggins around the irreducibly cosmic fact of this band.